The Trump administration has initiated the federal purchase of stakes in 41 companies across numerous industries, including energy, minerals, drones, computing, and semiconductors. This is an aggressive and troubling foray into socialism, as Cato scholars are documenting in the Restoring Free Enterprise project.

If extended, federal ownership of these firms will likely end in stagnation, inefficiency, and financial failure. Consider Amtrak. Congress created the passenger rail firm in 1970 expecting it to “become self-sufficient and operate as a private entity without subsidies within a few years.” But five decades later, government-owned Amtrak is as inefficient as ever and consumes vast subsidies, as I discuss in a new Cato study. 

President Trump wanted his own sovereign wealth fund. When the White House realized it would require congressional action, the administration went ahead and started building an ad hoc portfolio anyway, one deal at a time. Section 1051 of the Senate’s fiscal year 2027 National Defense Authorization Act would reward the administration for its opaque and legally dubious equity operation. It would give the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital a dedicated account and express authority through 2037 to buy stakes in suppliers of critical minerals, materials, chemicals, and batteries.

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While you were busy attending to the earthquake at the national politics level, voters around the states were addressing civic matters on their initiative and referendum ballots. Some results on issues I previewed last month, plus a few others:

• California voters rejected Proposition 40, which would have imposed a retroactive wealth tax, and instead approved Proposition 42, which bans both wealth taxes and retroactive taxes. Unfortunately, voters in Colorado narrowly approved a graduated income tax. Measures to limit income tax succeeded in North Carolina and Iowa but failed in Washington. 
• Efforts to build things in California will continue to be hobbled by the objector-friendly provisions of the notorious California Environmental Quality Act, or CEQA, after a partial rollback of the law failed.
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President Trump, who often campaigned on the slogan “too big to rig,” has told reporters he will accept rather than try to overturn the midterm election results. That would be welcome. If so, he might want to offer a token of seriousness by asking the Department of Justice to drop the meritless litigation it is still pursuing, seeking to overrule the state of Alaska’s authority to certify a winner in its Senate race. 

The Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal is already suggesting that there was no need for “all the hyperventilating about what Mr. Trump might do” to meddle with the midterms—after all, they went forward without incident. The “wildly speculative nightmares about mass election theft,” it avers, were “another partisan panic attack, promoted to gin up interest and enthusiasm”—that is, were promoted insincerely.

The editorial’s chosen narrative requires a great forgetfulness about the actual record. It is clear that for the past 18 months, Trump has indeed been intent on messing with the midterms. 

Democrats won control of both houses of Congress in last night’s midterm elections. Criminal law and civil liberties are likely to be at the top of the legislative agenda once they take office in January. Here are issues they should prioritize—some in response to abuses committed by the Trump Administration, others as efforts to extend an olive branch to the executive branch and their Republican colleagues.

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Today the Cato Institute released the “Freedom in the 50 States” report for 2026. 

This revamped index consists of 97 policy measures over 10 categories sorted into either economic freedom or personal freedom. It assigns scores and letter grades to US states based on this general combined level of freedom. And, for the first time in the report’s history, this edition also scores and grades governors on how well or poorly they have advanced both economic and personal liberty in their states.

You can see the results here. And you can take a deep dive into the scores using the Data Dashboard and interactive maps. There’s plenty to see and analyze for yourself.

The project was over a year in the making. And when you spend that much time on a project, you usually accumulate plenty of insights. So you’ll be seeing more analysis from me based on the data in the index for Cato’s blog, in future policy reports, and elsewhere.

As my colleague Tad DeHaven announced here earlier this week, Cato just launched the Restoring Free Enterprise project to analyze the federal government’s growing and unprecedented ownership of private US companies and to propose ways to reverse this troubling trend. The United States’ new portfolio — now encompassing 35 different companies across a range of industries — raises numerous problems that the RFE project will document, and my latest Dispatch column covers what may be the most basic one: the complete lack of explicit legal authority to do any of these equity deals. 

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